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During the 70s, this gifted performer rose as a intelligent, witty, and youthfully attractive actress. She became a well-known figure on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to the smash hit English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the equivalent of Downton Abbey back then.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a connection with the handsome chauffeur Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s real-life husband, the actor John Alderton. This became a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas and Sarah and No Honestly.

The Peak of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career came on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This liberating, cheeky yet charming journey paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, funny, sunshine-y film with a excellent part for a older actress, tackling the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

This iconic role anticipated the emerging discussion about perimenopause and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an escapist midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly chosen in the smash-hit film version. This very much paralleled the comparable transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 theater piece, Educating Rita.

The Narrative of The Film's Heroine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is weary with life in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity place with uninteresting, dull people. So when she gets the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with both hands and – to the amazement of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the vacation spot, which means a delightfully passionate escapade with the mischievous resident, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking moustache and speech by the performer Tom Conti.

Bold, open Shirley is always breaking the fourth wall to tell us what she’s pondering. It earned huge chuckles in theaters all over the Britain when her love interest tells her that he appreciates her stretch marks and she remarks to the audience: “Men are full of nonsense, aren't they?”

Post-Valentine Work

After Valentine, Pauline Collins continued to have a vibrant career on the theater and on television, including roles on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the film industry where there appeared not to be a screenwriter in the league of Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable set in Calcutta drama, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a British missionary and Japanese prisoner of war in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in the late 90s. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's transgender story, the film from 2011 Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the Upstairs, Downstairs environment in which she played a servant-level domestic worker.

However, she discovered herself often chosen in condescending and overly sentimental silver-years films about seniors, which were beneath her talents, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and Quartet, as well as subpar set in France film The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (though a small one) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the questionable clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a extraordinary time to shine.